Technology

If you're a big fan of the 'Back to the Future' movies, you'll be very pleased to hear that the company which produced the films' iconic vehicle, DeLorean, will soon release an electric version of the slick ride. Called the DMCEV, the car will go ... into production in 2013 and cost $90,000. The exotic DeLorean, complete with hard edges and gulf-winged doors, is undoubtedly a big part of 1980s pop culture. Featured in all three 'Back to the Future' films, the vehicle has remained a cult favorite in the years since. The DeLorean Motor Co., which is based in Humble, Texas, to this day continues to ... (view more)

A Florida woman got the shock of a lifetime this week when she opened her cellphone bill only to find the total roughly equal to the price of a slick Ferrari sports car. Even more surprising, the bill wasn't a mistake on the part of T-Mobile, ... meaning the woman was on the hook for the full charge. Celina Aarons, a resident of southern Florida, was recently charged $201,000 for a single month of charges to a cellphone registered in her name. Aarons was stunned to find that charge because she hadn't made any phone calls over seas, and immediately contacted her cellphone provider. Phone Bill ... (view more)

A tandem of researchers in Singapore claim to have discovered a way to use table salt as a means to increase the density at which bits of data can be stored on a hard disk drive platter. Early projections indicate that this 'salty' method is ... actually 5 times more efficient than current hard disk densities. The method was first introduced by Joel Yang, a scientist at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) at Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research. Yang was able to hone his method using an extremely high-resolution e-beam lithography -- the same process by ... (view more)

Wildlife researchers have created the first ever "smart" collar for animals in the wild that is able to track and record their daily patterns in ways never before thought imaginable. Thanks to a series of tests featuring a ten-year-old captive ... female mountain lion, researchers were able to develop a "library of signatures" to identify nearly every kind of animal movement. The collar itself utilizes a combination of global positioning technology and accelerometers to measure the metabolic inner life of the animal when leaping, running or sleeping. The end result, as University of California ... (view more)

Just when it seemed things couldn't get much worse for BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM), the company has been slammed by a massive service outage that has left smartphone users around the world unable to make calls or send text messages. ... Reports suggest BlackBerry users in Europe, the Mid East, South America and Africa have been the hardest-hit by the recent outage. It's estimated that about 10 million Research in Motion customers are affected by the outage, which started early Monday morning, Eastern Standard Time. The problem has prevented BlackBerry users from completing phone ... (view more)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs passed away last Wednesday at the age of 56. Although Jobs had been suffering on-and-off from pancreatic cancer for seven years, the news of his death sent most people -- techies or not -- into a head spin. Virtually every media ... outlet and Apple fan have taken considerable time to remember the popular businessman and innovator. (Source: mercurynews.com ) To get an idea of how important Steve Jobs was to the tech industry, you don't necessarily need to focus on all the nice things said about him by U.S. President Barack Obama or fellow Apple founder Steve Wozniak. Just pay ... (view more)

Microsoft has announced that Windows 8 will allow users to create multiple virtual machines on a single computer. It's a feature that's previously only been available on Microsoft's server version of Windows. The tool, which is referred to as ... Microsoft's "Hyper-V," allows users to make virtual copies of PCs -- all within 1 PC (hence, it's "virtualized"). Virtualization, more importantly, addresses major security issues in that it separates the host hardware (your computer) from the operating system (Windows) and the applications which run within Windows. Run 5, 10, 5,000 ... (view more)

A hardware manufacturer has revealed that applications designed for smartphones running Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system (OS) will work on PCs running the next edition of Windows. It's believed that this could encourage developers to ... turn their attention to the phone OS. At the moment, there are an estimated 30,000 applications available on smartphones running Windows Phone 7. That may sound a lot, but it's only around one-eighth of the number available on Android phones, and less than one-tenth of those available for Apple's portable devices. Chicken and Egg Situation This ... (view more)

The Department of Justice (DoJ) has launched a legal bid to block a planned merger of cellphone giants AT&T and T-Mobile. Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has hinted it may also raise objections. The proposed merger between ... the second- and fourth-largest cellphone networks respectively would create a new market leader, with a combined subscriber base of 130 million overtaking the current number one, Verizon. From the moment the deal was announced, speculation began that regulators would be wary of the "big four" becoming the "big three". Concerns Result in ... (view more)